The Sweetest Dream

  The spoon went in, a swallow.

  ‘First, I shall make you well again, and then you will go to school and take your examinations. After that you will go to university and be a doctor. Now I am sorry I wasn’t a doctor, but you can be a doctor in my place.’

  ‘I can’t. I can’t. I can’t go back to school.’

  ‘Why can’t you? Andrew has told me that you were clever at your lessons, before you became foolish. And now take this cup and drink the rest by yourself.’

  The observers hardly breathed, at this moment of–surely?–crisis. Suppose Tilly–Sylvia refused the cup with its life-giving soup, and put that thumb back in her mouth? Suppose she shut her lips tight? Julia was holding the mug against the hand that was not clutching the shawl around her. ‘Take it.’ The hand trembled, but opened. Julia put the mug carefully into the hand, and held the hand around the cup. The hand did lift, the cup reached the lips and over it came the whisper, ‘But it’s so hard.’

  ‘I know it’s hard.’

  The trembling hand was holding the cup to her lips, while Julia steadied it. The girl took a sip, swallowed. ‘I’m going to be sick,’ she whispered.

  ‘No, you are not. Stop it, Sylvia.’

  Again Frances and her son waited, holding their breaths. Sylvia wasn’t sick, though she had to conquer retching, when Julia said, ‘Stop it.’

  Meanwhile, down the stairs from the ‘boys’ floor’ came Colin, and behind him, Sophie. The two stopped. Colin was blushing bright red, and Sophie was half laughing, half crying, and seemed about to run back upstairs, but instead came to Frances, put her arms around her, and said, ‘Dear, dear Frances,’ and ran off down the stairs, laughing.

  ‘It’s not what you think,’ said Colin.

  ‘I’m not thinking anything,’ said Frances.

  Andrew merely smiled, keeping his counsel.

  Now Colin saw the little scene through the door, took it in, and said, ‘Good for Grandma,’ and went off down the stairs in big leaps.

  Julia who had taken no notice of her audience, got down from the stool, and smoothed down her skirts. She took the mug from the girl. ‘I’m going to come back in an hour and see how you are,’ she said. ‘And then I’ll take you up to my bathroom, and you can put on clean clothes. You’ll be better in no time, you’ll see.’

  She picked up the cup of cold chocolate left last night by Frances, and came out of the room and handed it to her. ‘I think this is yours,’ she said. And then, to Andrew, ‘And you can stop being foolish too.’ She left the door into the room open, and went up the stairs, holding up her pink skirt, which rustled, with one hand.

  ‘So that’s all right,’ said Andrew to his mother. ‘Well done, Sylvia,’ he called to the girl, who smiled, if weakly. He ran upstairs. Frances heard one door shut, Julia’s and then another, Andrew’s. In the room opposite a blotch of sunlight lay on a pillow, and Sylvia, for there is no doubt that this was who she was now, held her hand in it, turning it back and forth, examining it.

  At this moment there was a banging on the front door, the bell rang repeatedly, and a woman’s voice was shouting. The girl sitting in the sun on her bed let out a cry, and dived under the bedclothes.

  As the door opened, the shout of ‘Let me in’ could be heard through the house. A hoarse hysterical voice, ‘Let me in, let me in.’

  Andrew’s door opened with a bang, and he came leaping down the stairs saying, ‘Leave this to me, oh, Christ, shut Tilly’s door.’ Frances shut the door, as Julia called down, ‘What is it, who is it?’ Andrew called up to her, but softly, ‘Her mother, Tilly’s mother.’

  ‘Then I am sorry to say that Sylvia will have a setback,’ said Julia, and continued to stand there, on guard.

  Frances was still in her nightdress, and she went into her room, and dragged on jeans and a jersey and ran down the stairs towards voices in altercation.

  ‘Where is she? I want Frances,’ shouted Phyllida, while Andrew was saying quietly, ‘Hush, don’t shout, I’ll get her.’

  ‘I’m here,’ said Frances.

  Phyllida was a tall woman, thin as a bone, with a mass of badly dyed reddish hair, and long needle nails, painted bright purple. She pointed a large angry hand at Frances and said, ‘I want my daughter. You have stolen my daughter.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ said Andrew, hovering about the hysterical woman like an insect trying to decide where it should dart in. He laid a calming hand on Phyllida’s shoulder but she shook it off, and Andrew shouted at her, suddenly out of control and surprised at himself. ‘Stop it.’ He leaned back against a wall, composing himself. He was trembling.

  ‘And what about me?’ demanded Phyllida. ‘Who is going to look after me?’

  Frances found that she was trembling too; her heart thumped, her breathing was tight: she and Andrew were being affected by this dynamo of emotional energy. And in fact Phyllida, whose eyes stared blankly like a ship’s figurehead’s, who stood there erect and triumphant, seemed calmer than they were.

  ‘It’s not fair,’ announced Phyllida, pointing her purple talons at Frances. ‘Why should she come to live here and not me?’

  Andrew had recovered. ‘Now, Phyllida,’ he said, and the humorous smile that protected him was back in place, ‘Phyllida, you really can’t do this, you know.’

  ‘Why shouldn’t I? she asked, turning her attention to him. ‘Why should she have a home and not me?’

  ‘But you have a home,’ said Andrew. ‘I’ve visited you there, don’t you remember?’

  ‘But he’s going away and leaving me.’ Then, shrieking, ‘He’s going away and leaving me alone.’ Then, more calmly, to Frances, ‘Did you know that? Well, did you? He’s going to leave me the way he left you.’

  This rational remark seemed to prove to Frances how thoroughly the hysteria had transferred itself to her: she was shaking and her knees were weak.

  ‘Well, why don’t you say something?’

  ‘I don’t know what to say,’ Frances brought out. ‘I don’t know why you are here.’

  ‘Why? You actually have the nerve to ask why?’ And she began shouting, ‘Tilly, Tilly, where are you?’

  ‘Leave her alone,’ said Andrew. ‘You always complain you can’t handle her, so let us have a shot at it.’

  ‘But she’s here. She’s here. And what about me? Who is going to look after me?’

  This cycle was likely to continue.

  Andrew said quietly, but his voice was shaking, ‘You can’t expect Frances to look after you. Why should she?’

  ‘But what about me? What about me?’ Now it was more of a grumble, and for the first time those angry eyes seemed actually to see Frances. ‘It’s not as if you’re Brigitte Bardot, are you? So why does he come here all the time?’

  This threw an unexpected light on things. Frances was unable to speak.

  Andrew said, ‘He comes here because we are here, Phyllida. We are his sons, remember? Colin and I–have you forgotten us?’

  It seemed she had. And suddenly, having stood there for a few moments, she lowered that outstretched accusing finger, and stood blinking, apparently coming awake. Then she turned and slammed out of the door.

  Frances felt her whole self go loose. She was shaking so she had to lean against the wall. Andrew stood limply there, pitifully smiling. She thought, But he’s too young to cope with this sort of thing. She staggered to the kitchen door, held on to it while she went in, and saw Colin and Sophie at the table, eating toast.

  Colin, she could see, was in his mood of disapproving of her. Sophie had been crying again.

  ‘Well,’ said Colin, coldly furious, ‘what do you expect?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Frances, absurdly, but she was trying to gain time. She slid into her chair and sat with her head in her arms. She knew what he meant. It was a general accusation: that she and his father had screwed things up, that she was not a conventional comfortable mother, like other mothers, and there was this bohemian household, which he had moods o
f violently resenting, while admitting he enjoyed it.

  ‘She just comes here,’ said Colin, ‘she just turns up and makes a scene and now we have to look after Tilly.’

  ‘She wants to be called Sylvia,’ said Andrew, who had come in and was at the table.

  ‘I don’t care what she’s called,’ said Colin. ‘Why is she here?’

  And now he was tearful, and looked like a ruffled little owl, with his black-rimmed spectacles. If Andrew was all length and leanness, then Colin was round, with a soft open face, which was at this moment puffy with crying. Now Frances understood that all last night these two, Colin and Sophie, had probably lain in each other’s arms weeping, she for her dead father, and he for his misery over–well, everything.

  Andrew, who like Frances was still cold and shaking, said, ‘But why take it out on Mother? It’s not her fault.’

  If something were not done the brothers would start quarrelling; they often did, always because Andrew took Frances’s side, while Colin accused her.

  Frances said, ‘Sophie, please make me a cup of tea–and I am sure Andrew could do with one.’

  ‘God, could I,’ said Andrew.

  Sophie jumped up, pleased at being asked. Colin, having lost the support of her being there, just opposite him, sat blinking vaguely about, so unhappy that Frances wanted to take him in her arms . . . but he would never tolerate that.

  Andrew said, ‘I’ll go and see Phyllida later. She’ll have calmed down. She’s not so bad when she’s not in a state.’ And then he jumped up. ‘Christ, I’d forgotten Tilly, I mean Sylvia, and she’ll have heard. She goes to pieces when her mother starts in on her.’

  ‘And I am certainly in pieces,’ said Frances. ‘I can’t stop shaking.’

  Andrew ran out of the room, but did not return. Julia had descended to sit with Sylvia, who hid beneath the clothes, wailing, ‘Keep her away, keep her away,’ while Julia said over and over again, ‘Shhhh, be quiet. She’ll go in a minute.’

  Frances drank tea in silence while her shaking subsided. If she had read in a book that hysteria was contagious she would have said, Well, yes, that makes sense! But she had not experienced it. She was thinking, If that’s what Tilly has been living with, no wonder she’s in a mess.

  Sophie had sat down beside Colin and the pair had their arms around each other, like orphans. Soon they went off to catch a train back to school, and Colin gave her an apologetic smile before he left. Sophie embraced her. ‘Oh, Frances, I don’t know what I’d do if I couldn’t come here.’

  And now Frances had to write her article.

  She put aside the letters about shoplifting and took up another theme, ‘Dear Aunt Vera, I am so worried I don’t know what to do.’ Her daughter, aged fifteen, was having sex with a boy of eighteen. ‘These young people they think they are the Virgin Mary and it can’t happen to them.’ She advised the anxious mother to get contraception for her daughter. ‘Go to the family doctor,’ she wrote. ‘Young people are beginning sexual relations much earlier than we did. You could ask about the new contraceptive pill. There will be problems. Not all teenagers are responsible beings, and this new pill must be taken regularly, every day.’

  Thus it was that Frances’s first article evoked storms of moral outrage. Letters arrived in bundles from frightened parents, and Frances expected the sack, but Julie Hackett was pleased. Frances was doing what she had been hired to do, as could have been expected from a being brave enough to say that Carnaby Street was a shoddy illusion.

  • • •

  The waves of refugees who washed into London, escaping from Hitler, and then from Stalin, were bone-poor, often threadbare, and lived as they could on a translation here, a book review, language lessons. They worked as hospital porters, on building sites, did housework. There were a few cafés and restaurants as poor as they were, catering for their nostalgic need to sit and drink coffee and talk politics and literature. They were from universities all over Europe, and were intellectuals, a word guaranteed to incite waves of suspicion in the breasts of the xenophobic philistine British, who did not necessarily think it a commendation when they admitted that these newcomers were so much better educated than they were. One café in particular served goulash and dumplings and heavy soups and other filling items to these storm-tossed immigrants who would soon would be adding value and lustre in so many ways to native culture. By the late Fifties, early Sixties, they were editors, writers, journalists, artists, a Nobel Prize winner, and a stranger walking into the Cosmo would judge that this must be the trendiest place in north London, for everyone was in the current uniform of non-conformity, polo necks and expensive jeans, Mao jackets and leather jackets, shaggy hair or the ever-popular Roman Emperor haircut. There were women there, a few, in mini-skirts, mostly girlfriends, absorbing attractive foreign ways as they drank the best coffee in London and ate cream cakes inspired by Vienna.

  Frances had taken to dropping in to the Cosmo, to work. In the layer of the house she had thought of as hers, safe from invasion, she now sat listening for Julia’s footsteps, or Andrew’s, for they both visited Sylvia, to give her cups of this or that, and insisted that her door must be kept open because the girl feared a door that was shut on her. And Rose crept about the house. Once Frances had found her nosing through papers on her desk, and Rose had giggled and said brightly, ‘Oh, Frances,’ and run out. She had been caught in Julia’s rooms, by Julia. She did not steal, or not much, but she was by nature a spy. Julia told Andrew that Rose should be asked to leave; Andrew told Frances that this was what Julia had said; and Frances, relieved, because she disliked the girl, told Rose that it was time she returned to her family. Collapse of Rose. Reports were brought up from the basement where Rose hung out (‘It’s my pad’) that Rose was in bed crying, and that she seemed to be ill. Things had drifted, and Rose appeared again at the supper table, defiant, angry, and placatory.

  It could be argued that to complain about these minor disruptions at home, and then choose to sit in a corner at the Cosmo, which always reverberated with debate and discussion was–surely–a little perverse. Particularly as the overheard talk was bound to be revolutionary. All these people were types of revolutionary, even if the results of revolution were what they had fled from. They were mostly representatives of some phase of the Dream, and might argue for hours about what happened in such and such a meeting in 1905 in Russia, or in 1917, or in Berchtesgaden, or when German troops invaded the Soviet Union, or the state of affairs in the Rumanian oilfields in 1940. They argued about Freud, and Jung, about Trotsky, Bukarin, about Arthur Koestler and the Spanish Civil War. And Frances, whose ears shut tight when Johnny began on one of his harangues, found it all rather restful, though she did not actively listen. It is true that a noisy café full of cigarette smoke (then an indispensable accompaniment to intellectual activity) is more private than a home where individuals drop in for a chat. Andrew liked it there. So did Colin: they said it had good energy, not to mention positive vibes.

  Johnny used it a lot, but then he was in Cuba, so she was safe.

  Frances was not the only one from The Defender. A man was there who wrote political articles, to whom she had been introduced by Julie Hackett thus, ‘This is our chief politico, Rupert Boland. He’s an egghead but he’s not a bad sort of person, even if he is a man.’

  He was not a person you would notice at once, normally, but here he did stand out, because he wore a rather dull brown suit and a tie. He had a pleasant face. He was writing, or making notes, with a biro, just as she was. They smiled and nodded, and at that moment she saw a tall man in a Mao jacket stand up to leave. Good Lord, it was Johnny. He shrugged on a long Afghan coat, dyed blue, the last word in Carnaby Street, and went out. And there a few tables away, in a corner, obviously trying not to be seen (probably by Johnny) was Julia. She was in conversation with . . . he was certainly an intimate friend. Her boyfriend? Frances had recently been acknowledging that Julia was not much over sixty. But no, Julia could not have an affair (th
e word she would use was probably liaison) in a house crammed with ever-watching youngsters. It was as ludicrous as that Frances could.

  Giving up the theatre, which probably she had done for ever, Frances had felt she was slamming a door on romance, or serious love.

  And Julia . . . Frances was thinking that Julia must be pretty lonely, by herself at the top of that crammed noisy house, where the young ones called her the old woman or, even, the old fascist. She listened to classical music on the radio, and read. But she did go out sometimes, and it seemed she came here.

  Julia was wearing a misty-blue costume and a mauveish hat with–of course–a tiny net veil. Her gloves lay on the table. Her gentleman friend, grey haired, well-kept, was as elegant and old-fashioned as she was. He got up, bent over Julia’s hand, where his lips met in the air over it. She smiled, and nodded, and he went out. Her face, when he left, composed itself into a look Frances understood was stoicism. Julia had enjoyed an hour off her leash, and would now go home, or perhaps do some frugal shopping. Who was keeping an eye on Sylvia? That meant Andrew must be at home. Frances had not again been in his room, but she believed that he was spending long hours alone there, smoking and reading.

  It was Friday. That evening she could expect the supper table to have chairs fitted close all around it. It would be an occasion and everyone knew it, the St Joseph crowd too, because Frances had telephoned Colin to say Sylvia was coming down to supper, and could he make sure everyone called her Sylvia. ‘And ask them to be tactful, Colin.’ ‘Thanks for having so little confidence in us,’ he had replied.

  Meanwhile his protective care of Sophie had become love, and the two were acknowledged as a couple at St Joseph’s. ‘A couple of lovebirds,’ Geoffrey had said, being magnanimous, since he was bound to be jealous. Of Geoffrey one could expect gentlemanly behaviour, even if he did shoplift . . . even if he was a thief. Which was more than one could say of Rose, whose jealousy of Sophie shone from her eyes and spiteful face.

  Dear Aunt Vera. Our two children say they won’t go back to school. Our son is fifteen. The girl is sixteen. They were playing truant for months before we knew it. Then the police told us they were spending the time with some bad types. Now they hardly come home at all. What shall we do?